Dtube redesign proposal
^^ not sure whether i should have had the chart as thumbnail.
Thank you
A special thanks to the @onelovedtube, @graylan and @vladivostok for helping me understand how dtube works when i was extremely new to steem and to the amazing content creators of dtube. I hope to grow the Dtube community into a beautiful group of developers, content creators and the casual viewer. We are dtube!
I encourage @nathanmars @nannal and @heimindanger to consider the possibility of hosting videos in this manner or consider working with me on improving Dtube. And a call to all dtubers to get involved in their future.
Preamble
As a small amount of Dtubers know, videos are deleted from the Dtube's server after a period of time. It is around 30 days (not sure on that exact estimate). This requires content creators to host their own videos themselves or utilize services such as onelove Dtube. It is my understanding that most content creators do not care about whether their Dtube videos are deleted. Sorry to assume, but I have seen a lot of Dtubers solely focused on reward and nothing else. Why would someone that worked so hard into their content just let it be deleted? Whether content creators care about their videos or not, its completely their choice. We do not feel that is the way Dtube should be. I have seen a lot of active communities in Dtube so maybe its time for a little change to this system.
Now i don't mean to jab dtube very much, these are just my observations, opinions with absolutely no weight. However, there is an underlying issue with dtube.
The details
First off, many backup systems already do exist such as @techcoderx's nodejs bot, my own in java and a few others. But none of these offer permanent solutions to the problem of videos being deleted or potentially dtube's servers going down. I will give them credit it is a huge operation they are undertaking. A whopping 34 out of 71 Terabytes (Rough Tib to Tb estimate) are currently used in dtube's ceph storage servers. Also i'm not sure if that is for all the videos or just ones not deleted (I will
safely assume ones not deleted). That is a huge task to accomplish and certainly no one is capable alone to host this amount of data. How about communities? They surely have plenty of storage. Most computer hard drives are around 1Tb now and are capable of storing large amounts of video data. Currently there is very little incentive to host other content creator's videos, but plenty of incentive to make money... See where this is going?
Imagine a community where the goal is to help each other out by storing videos. For the people just willing to make a profit that's always an option. People wanting just to make a profit can buy the most inexpensive hardware and try to make as much money possible. This will create a competition for who sells the cheapest storage, lowering the price for other users to store videos. Thus creating a decentralized market place where content creators and dtube itself can go to store videos. Having said that, communities (for hosting) should get a little bonus from dtube or a dtube alternative ;). Growing these communities to support the entire dtube platform is the ultimate goal.
The technical bit... In order to accomplish this goal I have been working on an experimental program called permanente. It was originally meant to function as a large scale backup framework, designed for automating and managing enterprise class storage grids. I decided to switch its agenda after realizing most people aren't going to use it except myself. I am working on a full "white paper" for permanente detailing all aspects of the architecture that will deployed on sites like axil's dtube / dtube fork. Feel free to test out dtube fork, we do not guarantee your videos be not deleted on accident, but i will not delete them on purpose. Video storage is completely free for now. I will be adding a limit for uploads until permanente is fully working. You can read up permanente in my older steem posts. "formal project announcement", quickstart. White paper will be available soon. Full scale development will start immediately after completion of white paper.
Architecture overview:
As you can see it is a quite complex process, through community involvement, I hope to make it easy for anyone to provide video hosting to the dtube community. More details on the exact underlying design in future posts!
NOTE: server usage was from a question on dtube's discord.
Next post: Official universal dtube video technical format. (planned) Stay tuned!
Since you made it this far...
STAY FROSTY DTUBERS!
#permanente #dtubearmy @dtubearmy #onelove #ipfs #WeAreDtube